Web 2.0 needs a monopoly

I was chatting with Kurt (my colleague at digitalinfest) the other day and we started complaining about the things we don't like in this web2.0 environment. Don't get me wrong, web2.0 is lovely but there are some really annoying things about it.

One of it's biggest problems is a sort of compatibility issue, an ethic compatibility issue. There are a lot of social web2.0 services out there, primarily social networking services. All those services work in there own way and couldn't care less about connecting with other networks. That's a problem really, for example:

In Belgium the two largest social networks are Facebook and Netlog. I spoke to a South-American person a few weeks ago and he told me his name on Orkut, then a week later a met a guy from England and he gave me his meebo profile.

Do you see my problem? There is no way I'm going to make an account on all those social networks, but I would like to keep in touch with those people other than only sending them emails (IM is hard too 'cause there's a billion IM services out there).

To elliminate this problem that - I'm sure - many of us have been irritated with, I see two possible options: a big player with a monopoly or a system like openID that functions as a platform with basic profile information on which social networks can act as a sort of higher level layer.

A system like openID would be the most perfect solution I can imagine, but I think we all know that there's nobody out there willing to dedicate a whole serverfarm to a service that nobody will actually see and thus no end-user will care about.

So I turn to the other solution which is a lot more realistic, we need a big player in this market who can forge a strong monopoly so every single user in the world will be using that social network. I know the word monopoly sounds evil but look at it this way: How many railroad companies do you have? How many choices of services do you have when mailing a letter? One, and that's because it's the only way that works.

This post also concerns other web2.0 services like social news websites or services to get your photos online, I use Digg and Picasaweb but there are a lot of other commonly used services out there: Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, Flickr, photos on Windows Live Spaces, ...

So what's my conclusion? I think it would be better for the end-user to have one service provider for every specific service such as social networks, photos, social news sites, instant messaging, ...
This might sound rather strange because normally an end-user benefits when there is hard competition which pushes companies to deliver better 'stuff' to the consumer. But that's not the point here, the point in social services on the web is that you can connect with each other.